• Question: Do you have to stick to what a client or boss wants or are you completely free to do what you want?

    Asked by Phee to Andrew, Angela, Eleanor, Emma, Withdrawn on 5 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Andrew Pidgeon

      Andrew Pidgeon answered on 5 Mar 2016:

      There is always someone at the top giving us engineers instructions. It could be my manager or even the person who is paying for the engineering to be complete.

      However I am given a task and told to go away and create a solution to the problem. So I do have to listen and stick to what my boss says but then I am given some freedom.

      A good example is like this:
      Some days my boss says he wants a chicken mayonnaise sandwich from the local supermarket. [clear instructions with what he wants and where he wants it from]

      The next days he says can I get him some lunch when I pop out [I am given a lot of freedom to chose and I already know what he likes]

    • Photo: Emma Bradley

      Emma Bradley answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      A tricky one!

      Sometimes Clients don’t know what they want, or they might think they know, but when you look at the problem you realise they would actually prefer something else that they didn’t know was an option.

      Using the Andrew’s sandwich example, the Client might say that he wants a chicken sandwich from the local supermarket. When you get to the supermarket, you find that as well as chicken sandwiches, they have recently started selling chicken soup. So you phone him up and explain that because you know he is on a diet, he might want to consider the soup instead. It may cost a bit more, but he will get a result that is better for him.

    • Photo: Eleanor Sherwen

      Eleanor Sherwen answered on 15 Mar 2016:

      At Brompton my boss will outline how far a project can go. He’ll describe what problem we want to investigate, how much money we can spend, and the timeline. He might say there is a part or a process we do not want to change because it would be too complicated. Sometimes instead of a problem, he will say “we want to sell something to customers who are like this” and I will have to investigate and work out what I can do to make the product appeal to them.

      But within that I am free to achieve the goals however I decide is best. I might turn to him for advice, and for approval of key decisions, but I get a lot of freedom. If I think he has set the project boundaries in the wrong place, I will tell him this and if he agrees he will expand the project further. This happened with the frame parts I worked on, and that was because when I generated lots of ideas I showed that we could do something more interesting if we allowed more parts to be altered.

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